The Assassin's Blade
Page 22

The girl’s grin faded. “So you’d rather rot away here with a clean conscience?”
Yrene didn’t have a reply, so she didn’t say anything as she set down the rag and bowl and pulled out a small tin of salve. She kept it for herself, for the nicks and scrapes she got while working, but this cut was small enough that she could spare a bit. As gently as she could, she smeared it onto the wound. The girl didn’t flinch this time.
After a moment, the girl asked, “When did you lose your mother?”
“Over eight years ago.” Yrene kept her focus on the wound.
“That was a hard time to be a gifted healer on this continent, especially in Fenharrow. The King of Adarlan didn’t leave much of its people—or royal family—alive.”
Yrene looked up. The wildfire in the girl’s eyes had turned into a scorching blue flame. Such rage, she thought with a shiver. Such simmering rage. What had she been through to make her look like that?
She didn’t ask, of course. And she didn’t ask how the young woman knew where she was from. Yrene understood that her golden skin and brown hair were probably enough to mark her as being from Fenharrow, if her slight accent didn’t give her away.
“If you managed to attend the Torre Cesme,” the girl said, her anger shifting as if she had shoved it down deep inside her, “what would you do afterward?”
Yrene picked up one of the fresh bandages and began wrapping it around the girl’s arm. She’d dreamed about it for years, contemplated a thousand different futures while she washed dirty mugs and swept the floors. “I’d come back. Not to here, I mean, but to the continent. Go back to Fenharrow. There are a … a lot of people who need good healers these days.”
She said the last part quietly. For all she knew, the girl might support the King of Adarlan—might report her to the small town guard for just speaking ill of the king. Yrene had seen it happen before, far too many times.
But the girl looked toward the door with its makeshift bolt that Yrene had constructed, at the closet that she called her bedroom, at the threadbare cloak draped over the half-rotted chair against the opposite wall, then finally back at her. It gave Yrene a chance to study her face. Seeing how easily she’d trounced those mercenaries, whoever had harmed her must be fearsome indeed.
“You’d really come back to this continent—to the empire?”
There was such quiet surprise in her voice that Yrene met her eyes.
“It’s the right thing to do,” was all Yrene could think of to say.
The girl didn’t reply, and Yrene continued wrapping her arm. When she was finished, the girl shrugged on her shirt and tunic, tested her arm, and stood. In the cramped bedroom, Yrene felt so much smaller than the stranger, even if there were only a few inches’ difference between them.
The girl picked up her cloak but didn’t don it as she took a step toward the closed door.
“I could find something for your face,” Yrene blurted.
The girl paused with a hand on the doorknob and looked over her shoulder. “These are meant to be a reminder.”
“For what? Or—to whom?” She shouldn’t pry, shouldn’t have even asked.
She smiled bitterly. “For me.”
Yrene thought of the scars she’d seen on her body and wondered if those were all reminders, too.
The young woman turned back to the door, but stopped again. “Whether you stay, or go to Antica and attend the Torre Cesme and return to save the world,” she mused, “you should probably learn a thing or two about defending yourself.”
Yrene eyed the daggers at the girl’s waist, the sword she hadn’t even needed to draw. Jewels embedded in the hilt—real jewels—glinted in the candlelight. The girl had to be fabulously wealthy, richer than Yrene could ever conceive of being. “I can’t afford weapons.”
The girl huffed a laugh. “If you learn these maneuvers, you won’t need them.”
 
Celaena took the barmaid into the alley, if only because she didn’t want to wake the other inn guests and get into yet another fight. She didn’t really know why she’d offered to teach her to defend herself. The last time she’d helped anybody, it had just turned around to beat the hell out of her. Literally.
But the barmaid—Yrene—had looked so earnest when she talked about helping people. About being a healer.
The Torre Cesme—any healers worth their salt knew about the academy in Antica where the best and brightest, no matter their station, could study. Celaena had once dreamed of dwelling in the fabled cream-colored towers of the Torre, of walking the narrow, sloping streets of Antica and seeing wonders brought in from lands she’d never heard of. But that was a lifetime ago. A different person ago.
Not now, certainly. And if Yrene stayed in this gods-forsaken town, other people were bound to try to attack her again. So here Celaena was, cursing her own conscience for a fool as they stood in the misty alley behind the inn.
The bodies of the three mercenaries were still out there, and Celaena caught Yrene cringing at the sound of scurrying feet and soft squeaking. The rats hadn’t wasted any time.
Celaena gripped the girl’s wrist and held up her hand. “People—men—usually don’t hunt for the women who look like they’ll put up a fight. They’ll pick you because you look off-guard or vulnerable or like you’d be sympathetic. They’ll usually try to move you to another location where they won’t need to worry about being interrupted.”
Yrene’s eyes were wide, her face pale in the light of the torch Celaena had dropped just outside the back door. Helpless. What was it like to be helpless to defend yourself? A shudder that had nothing to do with the rats gnawing on the dead mercenaries went through her.
“Do not let them move you to another location,” Celaena continued, reciting from the lessons that Ben, Arobynn’s Second, had once taught her. She’d learned self-defense before she’d ever learned to attack anyone, and to first fight without weapons, too.
“Fight back enough to convince them that you’re not worth it. And make as much noise as you can. In a shit-hole like this, though, I bet no one will bother coming to help you. But you should still start screaming your head off about a fire—not rape, not theft, not something that cowards would rather hide from. And if shouting doesn’t discourage them, then there are a few tricks to outsmart them.
“Some might make them drop like a stone, some might get them down temporarily, but as soon as they let go of you, your biggest priority is getting the hell away. You understand? They let you go, you run.”
Yrene nodded, still wide-eyed. She remained that way as Celaena took the hand she’d lifted and walked her through the eye-gouge, showing her how to shove her thumbs into the corner of someone’s eyes, crook her thumbs back behind the eyeballs, and—well, Celaena couldn’t actually finish that part, since she liked her own eyeballs very much. But Yrene grasped it after a few times, and did it perfectly when Celaena grabbed her from behind again and again.
She then showed her the ear clap, then how to pinch the inside of a man’s upper thigh hard enough to make him scream, where to stomp on the most delicate part of the foot, what soft spots were the best to hit with her elbow (Yrene actually hit her so hard in the throat that Celaena gagged for a good minute). And then told her to go for the groin—always try to go for a strike to the groin.